Cryptographer Léo Perrin receives the 2018 Rolf Tarrach Award

Share this article:

Published on Tuesday, 10 July 2018

On Thursday, 5 July 2018, the association Amis de l’Université awarded the Rolf Tarrach Prize 2018 to Léo Perrin for his doctoral thesis entitled “Cryptanalysis, Reverse-Engineering and Design of Symmetric Cryptographic Algorithms”. The ceremony gathered more than 60 participants from academia and industry at the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce.

After an introduction by Professor Rolf Tarrach, President of the Amis de l’Université, Georges Schmit, as member of the government advisory board of SpaceResources.lu, shared his view on Luxembourg's very promising future of space exploration and resource exploitation.

Dr. Léo Perrin took the floor to present cryptography in a broader sense before focusing on his research activities, namely lightweight cryptography and S-Box reverse-engineering. “On the one hand, I investigated the cryptographic algorithms that are suitable for very constrained devices with little computing power such as RFID tags and small embedded processors such as those used in sensor networks. On the other hand, I investigated the methods recovering the hidden structure or the design criteria used to build an S-Box,” the researcher explains. He is currently pursuing his career as postdoc within the SECRET team at INRIA, the French National Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, and works on symmetric cryptography and Boolean functions.

This ceremony was also a good opportunity to honour Erna Hennicot-Schoepges who was President of the Amis de l’Université for 10 years, from 2008 to 2018.

As a conclusion, Professor Stéphane Pallage, Rector of the University of Luxembourg, congratulated Léo Perrin for his bold and innovative thesis and thanked Erna Hennicot-Schoepges for her exceptional commitment to the University.

By awarding the best doctoral award each year with a prize money of 10,000 euros, the Association Amis de l'Université aims to reward excellence in the field of research and to promote the international reputation of the University of Luxembourg.